Flawed Vision In 'Jfk' Film?

Commentary

In His New Movie, Oliver Stone Seems To Stack The Deck In Alleging A Massive Cover-up In The Kennedy Assassination.

December 18, 1991|By Tom Wicker New York Times

More than halfway into JFK, Oliver Stone's three-hour movie about the assassination of President Kennedy, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his wife, Liz, are seen watching a television documentary about Garrison's investigation of the events of Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

The documentary's anchorman is heard charging that the district attorney used improper methods to get witnesses to support his case against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for his part in a supposed conspiracy surrounding the murder of President Kennedy.

Kevin Costner, portraying Garrison, suggests by facial expression and dialogue that the charge is unfair and rigged to destroy his credibility - thus attacking the credibility of the documentary.

Frequently in JFK, which opens Friday, the district attorney alleges that the media are engaged in a cover-up of a monstrous conspiracy, which Stone confidently depicts as having resulted in the assassination of a president, the war in Vietnam, the killing of Robert Kennedy, perhaps even the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is a measure of Stone's heavily weighted storytelling that he gives only a fleeting glimpse of that one-hour 1967 documentary. Its evidence - the script is available - establishes without doubt that Garrison and his aides threatened and bribed witnesses, who then lied in court, and that they concealed the results of a polygraph test that showed one witness, Vernon Bundy, to be lying.

So much for the advertising for the Stone film, which proclaims of Garrison: ''He will risk his life, the lives of his family, everything he holds dear for the one thing he holds sacred - the truth.''

In fact, of all the numerous conspiracy theorists and zealous investigators of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Garrison may be the most thoroughly discredited - and not just by the NBC documentary.

His ballyhooed investigation ended ignominiously when his chosen villain, Clay Shaw, was acquitted; and the whole Garrison affair is now regarded, even by other conspiracy believers, as having been a travesty of legal process.

Despite all this, Jim Garrison is clearly the film's hero. He is played by Costner, one of Hollywood's hottest box-office attractions, fresh from his triumph in Dances With Wolves. Sissy Spacek plays his wife, and in an arrogant bit of casting against type, the real-life Garrison makes a cameo appearance as Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Controversial screenplay

JFK stirred controversy last summer when a draft of the screenplay by Stone and Zachary Sklar found its way to the press. Based chiefly on Garrison's 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, it adopts his argument that Lee Harvey Oswald was merely a patsy put forward to shield the actions of an immense body of conspirators involved in the murder and cover-up.

The controversy arose over fears that the film would develop a web of speculation and fiction around a tragic event of major historic significance. And indeed, it does treat matters that are wholly speculative as fact and truth, in effect rewriting history.

Stone built into his movie an all-encompassing defense: The film's Jim Garrison repeatedly says that any critics of his thesis are either part of the great conspiracy or are helping to cover it up. The only one of his assistants who argues and disagrees with him is shown to have been coerced by the FBI, a primary participant in Garrison's sprawling conspiracy.

Of course, any article critical of the movie - this one included - can be dismissed in the same way. Stone has already called himself, in USA Today, a target for ''a thousand and one vultures out there, crouched on their rocks.''

These were not just ''the usual Hollywood vultures,'' he said, but ''a lot of these paid-off journalist hacks that are working on the East Coast with their recipied political theories. . . .''

But there's a gaping hole in the movie's advance counterattack: If a conspiracy as vast and consequential as the one claimed could have been carried out and covered up for three decades, why did the conspirators or their heirs allow Stone to make this movie? Why not murder him, as they supposedly murdered others? Why, for that matter, didn't they knock off Garrison himself when - as Stone tells it - the New Orleans district attorney began so fearlessly to follow their trail?

A yearning for war?

JFK begins with real footage of President Eisenhower's farewell address, in which he eloquently warned of the dangers of the ''military-industrial complex.'' This sets up Stone's contention - borrowed, or swallowed whole, from Garrison - that generals, admirals and war profiteers so strongly wanted the war in Vietnam to be fought and the United States to stand tall and tough against the Soviets that when President Kennedy seemed to question these goals, he had to be killed so Vice President Johnson could take office.